The
film essay, and now more recently, the video essay, have virtually become
axiomatic in contemporary art, film and video. And yet, in certain quarters in the art
establishment these are two forms that still elicit controversy. You only have
to go to this as recently as the 2014 Turner Prize, which was awarded to the
Irish-born artist Duncan Campbell for his work It for Others, to appreciate how the essay audio-visual form (in
its various multiplying generic expressions) still creates aesthetic and
cultural static. This is incredible given how its lineage can be clearly traced
back to the historical avant-garde, film modernism, documentary cinema,
photojournalism, radio, and as we know, if we are tracing its arc back to its
literary essay origins back then we need to go the seminal French author and
traveller Michel Montaigne and even before him.

But
what I intend to do in this article is to speculatively discuss a recent
example of the form by the bold imaginative Australian independent filmmaker
John Hughes, whose exemplary oeuvre stands out in contemporary Australian
documentary film-making. I am referring to his little known, extraordinarily
crafted and compelling archive film essay about the not so well-known love
affair between two of this country’s major creative and public intellectuals,
the poet and activist Judith Wright and the cultural policy mandarin and
economist “Nugget” Coombs, aptly titled Love
& Fury (2013).

Their
clandestine love for each other lasted over 25 years and it symbolically
represents in many complex ways and nuances the intricate ethical, creative,
historical, and political vicissitudes of how our past literary, civic and
public life are elaborately intertwined shaping our post-colonial global and
national horizons. And also, as in the case of Wright and Coombs, the shared
adventure of letting go of one’s cultural cringe yoke in creating a republic on
‘our fatal shores’. (Robert Hughes).

What
we see and hear, time and again, in this poignant and resonant television
documentary, which was shown on ABC television quiet awhile back, through their
mutual love for this country and its first people, which stamps every archival
frame of this indispensable film, is their courageous, profound and poetic
understanding of what it means to accept and value our country and its first
descendants in our emerging turbulent world of neoliberal late capitalism,
(post) colonialism and climate change. Make no mistake about it: both Wright and
Coombs were fiercely dedicated and lyrical eco-warriors foreshadowing our
present day Anthropocene era.

In many significant ways, the underlying existential
and political theme of Hughes’ film critiques our public and private lives,
both in the past and in the present.It
is a devastating examination of how conservative, repressive and ‘life-dimming’
(Manning Clark) our past history has been. And if Wright and Coombs were alive
today they would be, one would imagine, vocal critics ofTony Abbott’s past and Malcolm Turnbull’s
recent ruinous political stewardship of this country. Our asylum seekers policy
of the last 20 years or so, clearly reeks of stubborn draconian cruelty, and
the ever-lingering remnants of our past “White Australia” policy would be an
anathema to our two subjects. Also, it pays us to remember that this film was
seen on the ABC, our unique national broadcaster, whose future now appears unfortunately
threatened by the encircling jackals of rampant free-market ideology. Including,
of course, judging by our recent Federal Budget, a certain group of right-wing
ideologues of the Coalition Government and the dreaded Pauline Hanson (One
Nation Party).

Raymond Gaita, in a timely and perceptive essay on
Simone Weil, the French philosopher and her posthumously published tract The Need for Roots (1949 [1952 in
English]), and our appalling government’s policy on asylum seekers, makes the forceful
point that we as artists and citizens need to re-examine the heroic and
grandeur character and limits of such concepts as dignity and human rights in
order to ethically hear the silent cry of the afflicted globalized asylum seekers
and the dispossessed. (1) Furthermore, Gaita deploys Weil’s sharply nuanced
ideas of being rooted in one’s national culture as a basic form of existential
and spiritual nourishment and country as ‘a vital medium.’ (2) Two vital
concepts that have importantly coloured the shared beliefs and actions of
Wright and Coombs in their tireless polemical endeavours to leave this world a
better place to live in.

In
fact, Hughes’ film reminds the viewer that all of us, living in this globalised
world of ours, are obliged to ensure that our ethical, cultural and theoretical
ideas and perspectives on ourselves and our institutions, values and priorities
at this historical juncture, more than ever before, are tested through our
individual and collective dangerously expanding carbon footprint on earth. In
other words, our geological imagination and understanding of how late
capitalism, climate change, power, space, time and technology are so
intricately braided with each other by the day are so compellingly urgent to acknowledge.

Before
we turn our attention to Hughes’s documentary in some detail, it would be
appropriate at this stage, to speak a little about Hughes’ own biographical
context, as one of our more imaginative, experimental documentary filmmakers
whose own aesthetic, artistic, cultural and historical roots and traditions as
an independent film-maker is primarily Australian in orientation, relating to
art, cultural politics and history.

His
prolific oeuvre, over the years, as a writer-director, include documentaries
dealing with various aspects of Australian race relations, film, history and
indigenous rights such as After Mabo (1997), River of Dreams (2000), and
“micro docs” such as Howard’s History (2004) and Howard’s Blemish (2004),
amongst many other sponsored and independent films. There are films dealing with the
Australian labor movement such as Film-Work (1981) and the widely-acclaimed hybrid work Traps (1986), amongst many others. Other films later are concerned with the early
Cold War including the already cited Film-Work and The Archive Project (2006), and Indonesia Calling: Joris Ivens in Australia (2009).

Between
1998 and 2008 Hughes collaborated with Betty Churcher to produce a marvellous
series of popular arts television programs including “micro docs” like Hidden Treasures (Film Australia/ABC TV
Arts, 2007) and in the following year An
Unstoppable Force: John Olsen with Betty Churcher (Film Australia/ABC TV
Arts, 2008).

Hughes
has also made a number of other acclaimed major films, installations/video art
and Super-8 films during the last 30 years that include a cinema feature What I Have Written (1996), All
That Is Solid (1988), One Way Street:
Fragments for Walter Benjamin (1992), and installations like November Eleven (1979), Works in Progress (1981), On Sacred Land (1984) and The Archive Project, ACMI version (2006).

Love
& Fury, as a television documentary, recording the complex
context and features of the illicit love affair and correspondence of Judith
Wright and “Nugget” Coombs allows for them to express and speak for themselves
in such poignant, resonant and intricate ways. Wright, not only one of
Australia’s greatest lyric poets whose interest resided in the individual’s
position in the world at large and not as nature per se, spoke of the feminine
experience at the heart of her poems. But as the years progressed, Wright’s
widely acclaimed poetry became a secondary concern to her as a disciplined
fiction writer immersed in the history of her ancestral pastoral forebears and their
pioneering role in the cultivation of agriculture for the New England district
of NSW. Consequently as a result, she became very acutely concerned with the
displacement of the original people of this country, the progressive ecological
despoliation and in general, her eco-activism initially focused on her abiding
love for this country and related environmental issues, but with her
relationship with “Nugget” Coombs, the Keynesian intellectual, policy mandarin
for both Labor and Liberal Governments and the first governor of the Reserve
Bank, she became very attracted to Coombs’ long-standing passionfor indigenous rights.

Wright’s direct activism is profoundly spelled out in her
letters to Coombs with such a sober, fierce ethical imperative that emerged
arguably out of her earlier White Settler’s sense of guilt relating to how the
wealth of her ancestral forebears and family was predicated substantially on
how it was built on the original owners of the land. Wright comes across, in
contrast to Coombs’ more gentle romantic persona, as someone who is more
self-disciplined, an eco-warrior, and more pragmatic in concentrating on changing
her world.

In essence, according to the historian Tom Griffiths in his
recent superb book on Australian historiography, The Art of Time Travel (2016), Wright in the 1970s was able to
reconcile her poetry with politics, with writing a new kind of creative
non-fiction that was able to combine her two burning passions of art and
activism. (3) Griffiths’ thesis is that Wright was able to reconcile these two
passions ‘that burned within her’, as Griffiths puts, it by choosing a
different kind of art, that of history. (4)

Central to Wright’s and Coombs’ love affair are the Whitlam
years in that it started in the first year of Whitlam’s Labor government and
with the dismissal of Whitlam Wright became vociferously scathing of the
reactionary conservative forces responsible for it.

As Coombs’ health became an urgent issue – all those
winters in Canberra brought upon Coombs’ pneumonia – Wright moved from her
Tamborine Mountain residence to Canberra to be closer to him in 1975/76 when he
was a visiting Fellow concerned with indigenous issues at the Australian
National University.

There is splendid archival footage of Wright living near
Braidwood in NSW and walking in the surrounds of her place. However, with the
regular bouts of pneumonia that Coombs experienced he decided to move to Darwin
six months a year to pursue his deep interests in indigenous justice and land
rights.

The relationship and correspondence of Wright and Coombs
became, over the years,quite complex
and urgent in their shared demanding trajectory to engage in environmental,
indigenous and cultural issues salient to their common vision of Australia
shedding her colonial monarchist ties to England.However, Wright believed that their activist
activities were too profoundly important to be negated by the surrounding
negative political forces and consequently Wright became more guarded and
self-censorious about their relationship and correspondence. Indeed, Wright
with her increasing sense of isolation and loss of hearing, etc., burned a fair
amount of the early letters between them. Much to Coombs’ consternation.

Love
& Fury contains numerous archival clips of Wright and Coombs together
in Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory, and elsewhere, vast panoramas of
the Outback, its flora and fauna, Aboriginal rock paintings, and the moving
iconic image of Gough Whitlam pouring red dirt through Vincent Lingiari’s
fingers (this was Coombs’ own suggestion) to the soundtrack of Paul Kelly’s
powerful anthem song for indigenous justice “From Little Things Big Things
Grow”, etc.Also, we encounter several
times Helen Morse and Paul English in a studio reading out the letters with
subtle restraint and poise.

From the very opening of Love & Fury, where we meet Wright’s daughter Meredith McKinney
recounting the time that Wright and Coombs visited Kakadu National Park and the
two became separated from each in the solitary landscape and McKinney
humorously offers the suggestion that she became terrified at the prospect of
losing two national treasures in the one day, to Nonie Sharp who was appointed
by McKinney to read and write about their correspondence, recounts the time
that both Wright and Coombs wanted to avoid being conspicuous at Uluru and decided
to drive around in the desert in a Red Moke car, to Tim Rowse, Coombs’
biographer, detailing some of the major policy milestones in Coombs’ own
career, to Fiona Capp and John Hawke respectively talking about Wright’s poetic
impulse, pastoral ancestry and her legacy to Australian literature, the film is
quite bold in its overall thematic and formal endeavour to honestly delineate
the many biographical, cultural and political complexities and issues that the
famous couple encountered over the years.

As an archival essay documentary, Love & Fury is quite an engaging and significant film that
explores the intellectual, cultural and emotional aspects of the Judith Wright
and “Nugget” Coombs’ relationship and correspondence and in terms of John
Hughes’ prolific independent film oeuvre it should be singled out as one of his
more accomplished television documentaries. Regrettably, it has somehow been
overlooked by many, apart from those who have a specific interest in his
experimental independent cinema. This is
a pity as it merits our critical attention, and although it is not by far
Hughes’ boldest creative effort (and many are bold indeed), Love & Fury has a special importance
as a television documentary that deals with a relatively little known subject,
the Wright-Coombs relationship, etc., and in that critical context it is a film
that is quite refreshingly respectful of its tremendously private and public
emotional character.